United Kingdom

If any single theme shaped British fiction in the year 2004, it was the impact of political forces on the everyday lives of individuals. With the war in Iraq dominating the year’s news headlines, this was perhaps not surprising. The Orange Prize for Fiction short list was a case in point. Of the six books nominated for the women-only prize, four were set against a backdrop of war or political strife. While all of these were set in the past, they invited comparisons to contemporary events. American Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire (winner of the National Book Award for Fiction in 2003) told the story of an English officer witnessing the cultural and social convulsions of China and Japan in the aftermath of World War II. Ice Road by South African-born London-based author Gillian Slovo was set in Russia during Joseph Stalin’s purges and the siege of Leningrad. Another Orange Prize contender was Purple Hibiscus (2003), a debut novel by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which depicted a 15-year-old Nigerian girl responding to changes in the texture of her personal life after a military coup shook the foundations of her country. The prizewinner was Andrea Levy for her novel Small Island, which explored the problems of Jamaican migration into London in the aftermath of World War II. Themes of racism, war, and empire ran through Levy’s story of Gilbert Joseph, a Caribbean man who had fought Adolf Hitler with the British Royal Air Force but was made to feel unwelcome in postwar London now that he was out of uniform. (For selected international literary awards in 2004, see below.)

Even children’s fiction revealed Britain’s preoccupation with war. The winner of the Whitbread Children’s Book Award, David Almond’s The Fire-Eaters, was a novel about Bobby Burns, a young boy whose world was fraught with uncertainty during the Cuban missile crisis. War likewise figured in three of the eight books competing for the Guardian Children’s Fiction award. In Meg Rosoff’s debut novel, How I Live Now, which won the award, war rips through the 21st-century British countryside, exposing the characters to unspeakable horrors. Another contender for the prize, Berkshire-based writer Leslie Wilson’s Last Train from Kummersdorf, was a complex and morally ambivalent tale about a boy and a girl trying to survive in the ruins of Nazi Germany at the end of World War II. The most widely reviewed novel on the list was well-known children’s writer Michael Morpurgo’s Private Peaceful, which introduced children to the waking nightmare of World War I. Morpurgo used the novel to draw attention to the need to pardon those teenagers who had eagerly signed up for that war without knowing the horrors that awaited them and who were subsequently executed for trying to desert. He stated, “The New Zealanders have pardoned their executed soldiers. So can we. A nation that refuses to deal with its shame cannot be called civilised.”

A study of the Stasi in former communist East Germany won the £30,000 (about $55,000) Samuel Johnson Prize, the U.K.’s most important prize for nonfiction. Australian Anna Funder spent several years interviewing both the victims and the former operatives of East Germany’s secret police to write Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall (2003), described by one reviewer as “brilliant and necessary.” The chair of the Samuel Johnson Prize judges, Michael Wood, said that the book was “a highly original close-up of what happens to people in the corrosive atmosphere of a totalitarian state. An intimate portrait of survivors caught between their desire to forget and the need to remember.”

The political and social climate of 1980s London created the backdrop for the 2004 Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The Line of Beauty. Alan Hollinghurst’s fifth novel bitterly satirized what one commentator called “the excessive greed and furious social climbing of Thatcherite Britain.” Its protagonist Nick Guest is initially taken in by the artificial glamour of the Fedden family, with its private recitals and the Guardi painting above the mantelpiece. His love affair with the upwardly mobile Tory family ends in disgrace and disillusionment, however: “In the remorseless glare of the news,…the flat looked even more tawdry and pretentious. He was puzzled to think he had spent so much time in it so happily and conceitedly. The pelmets and mirrors, the spotlights and blinds, seemed rich in criticism. It was what you did if you had millions but no particular taste: you made your private space like a swanky hotel; just as such hotels flattered their customers by being vulgar simulacra of lavish private homes. A year ago it had at least the glamour of newness.” The Line of Beauty faced stiff competition for the Man Booker from David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, a best seller and favourite with the bookmakers that interwove the stories of six characters inhabiting disparate times and spaces, including a 19th-century adventurer in the Pacific and a cloned slave bred to work in an underground fast-food eatery in a dystopian 22nd-century Korea. Each narrative was conveyed in a different stylistic genre, from science fiction to picaresque. Mitchell’s eccentric morphing of the English language made for some wildly original prose, but it was the overarching message of the novel that captured many critics’ praise. A reviewer for The Daily Telegraph described it as “a grand fictional treatise about the will to power—whether corporate or tribal, personal or consumer.” Another worthy contender was Londoner Gerard Woodward’s I’ll Go to Bed at Noon, which charted the course of a dysfunctional family of alcoholics in the years preceding the Thatcherite revolution.

By curious coincidence, several novelists created fictional homages to fin de siècle novelist Henry James. In The Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst’s protagonist is writing a Ph.D. thesis on James, with whom he is fascinated. Another contender for the Man Booker, The Master by Irish author Colm Tóibín, provided a prodigiously researched fictional portrait of James, tracing his life from January 1895, the month that his historical drama Guy Domville flopped on the London stage, to a family reunion in 1899. The time frame allowed Tóibín to examine the paranoia that presided over the late 1890s, the era in which Oscar Wilde was tried for homosexuality, and to imagine the effect it had on James, whose own sexuality was ambiguous and thwarted. The opening scene of Tóibín’s novel resurfaced later in another form with the publication of David Lodge’s strikingly authentic yet fictional account of Henry James, Author, Author. Lodge depicted James’s humiliating five-year campaign to win success writing for the British stage, contrasting it with the career of his successful friend George Du Maurier, the Punch magazine cartoonist and author of Trilby (1894). The result was a deft examination of the compulsions, jealousies, and failures that often accompany the life of a writer. Earlier, Emma Tennant had produced Felony (2002), a novel that unraveled the story behind James’s creation of The Aspern Papers (1888). A fifth novel inspired by James was Toby Litt’s Ghost Story, a contemporary reworking of James’s eerie masterpiece The Turn of the Screw (1898).

Virginia Woolf was another author who attracted press coverage in 2004, when the last of six essays originally published in Good Housekeeping magazine in 1931 was found by an enterprising publisher in the archives of the University of Sussex. The sketch of an eccentric London gossip called Mrs. Crowe was published along with the other five essays by Woolf in a volume titled The London Scene.

Novels appealing to both children and adults continued to dominate the market. Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), a mystery novel whose protagonist is a young boy with Asperger syndrome, sold almost one million copies. It also won the 2003 Whitbread Book of the Year Award and was voted both Children’s Book of the Year and winner of the Literary Fiction Award at the British Book Awards. In a joint statement, the Whitbread judges said, “It has been claimed of many recent books that they could be read equally by adolescents or by adults. We felt that this was a rare and genuine example of a book which would sit equally well on the shelves of any bedroom.” J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books likewise continued to sell in the millions to both children and adults, bringing her estimated earnings of £1.37 billion (about $2.49 billion). In August Rowling announced unexpectedly that she planned to add an eighth book to the series; she had previously vowed to write only seven Potter adventures.

Christian readers critical of the benign image of witchcraft in Rowling’s books found a riveting alternative in the works of G.P. Taylor, a policeman turned vicar. His popular children’s novel Shadowmancer (2002) was followed by its much-lauded sequel Wormwood. Taylor’s Gothic tales of 18th-century Britain are interlaced with Christian imagery, inviting comparisons to writers J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Wormwood, set in London, is replete with evil sorcerers, angel warriors, and an ancient leather-bound book that contains the secrets of the universe. Taylor’s books rivaled Rowling’s series on the best-.

In the nonfiction category, Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2003), appropriately subtitled The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, became a runaway best seller, with over 500,000 copies in print in the U.K. alone. Responding to an age of “ignorance and indifference,” and sloppy usage on the Internet, Truss made an entertaining case for the proper use of commas, semicolons, and apostrophes. “For any true stickler,…the sight of the plural word ‘Book’s’ with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated.”

Well-known American travel writer Bill Bryson, a resident of Britain, won the 2004 Aventis Prize for his first astonishing foray into popular science writing. A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003) attempted to comprehend everything from the big bang to the rise of human civilization, tackling subjects as diverse as geology, chemistry, paleontology, climatology, astronomy, and particle physics along the way. Reviewers commended Bryson for breathing life into his topics by including chats with living experts and humorous vignettes about some of history’s more eccentric scientists. Human interest also enlivened dry science in Andrew Brown’s book In the Beginning Was the Worm (2003). Brown’s study of the struggle to sequence the genome of a common microscopic worm was short-listed for the Aventis Prize.

Top food writer Nigel Slater successfully switched genres when he turned his hand to autobiography in Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger (2003). Slater’s method of retrieving episodes of his bleak childhood and motherless adolescence through memories of food led one critic to name him the “Proust of the Nesquik Era.” For a New York Times reviewer, Slater summoned up “Nick Hornby, Martin Amis, and Philip Larkin all at the same time.” Toast was voted Biography of the Year at the British Book Awards. Veteran author A.S. Byatt (seeBiographies) explored aging and death in Little Black Book of Stories, a collection of five Gothic tales.

On the poetry front, playwright Harold Pinter received the prestigious Wilfred Owen award for poetry for his volume War (2003), a collection of eight poems and one speech critical of the war in Iraq. Pinter’s poem “God Bless America” was widely quoted in the press but vilified by the American right. “Here they go again/ The Yanks in their armoured parade/ Chanting their ballads of joy/ As they gallop across the big world/ Praising America’s God./ The gutters are clogged with the dead.” Less controversy was stirred when Scottish poet and musician Don Paterson won the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Award, worth £10,000 (about $18,000), as well as the 2003 T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry, worth £5,000 (about $9,000). (Both prizes were awarded in 2004.) The poems in Landing Light (2003) were described by a reviewer in The Guardian newspaper as “examinations of becoming, of the processes of life,” even when they deal with everyday themes such as ice-skating or waking up with one’s child. Meanwhile, Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie won the £10,000 Forward Poetry Prize for The Tree House, a volume of poetry filled with “lichen-crusted bedrock,” alder trees, copulating frogs, and “brittle waves.” “What’s most in need of re-negotiation and repair,” Jamie explained, “…is our relationship with the natural world. We’re learning, or re-learning, that this is the only world, it’s not an anteroom or preparation for something ‘better.’ Neither is it an infinite ‘resource.’ ” The book’s epigraph was from Friedrich Hölderlin. The world may, or may not, be ending its lyric phase, but despite everything, “it is beautiful to unfold our souls and our short lives.”

United States

A survey sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts appeared in the summer of 2004 and warned of a decline in literary reading among Americans. Nonetheless, some of the best American writers wrote on, making the year, and the fall season in particular, a good one for American letters, regardless of the size of the audience.

Philip Roth, a writer who had from time to time worried out loud about the small number of serious American readers, thundered onto the best-seller list with The Plot Against America, a powerful work of alternative history. Though critic Frank Rich declared in the New York Times that the subgenre was “low-rent,” it served nevertheless as a marvelous vehicle for Roth’s depiction of paranoia lost. In the novel isolationist and Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential race, striking fear in the hearts of the family of young Philip and most other American Jews.

The prolific writer Joyce Carol Oates produced two books of fiction, a collection of short stories titled I Am No One You Know and the massive, multigenerational novel The Falls, which moved along with the power of the rough white-water rapids leading to the great cataract at Niagara. Reading the best of Oates was something like trying to navigate the rushing Niagara River of her novel at that point when “at first you think that your actions are propelling your little boat along at such speed; then you realize that the speed, the propulsion, has nothing to do with you. It is something happening to you.”

Other works by veteran novelists met with more mixed responses. Russell Banks’s The Darling, about a modern radical woman in Africa, and T.C. Boyle’s The Inner Circle, his version of the story of controversial sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, were hobbled at the outset by murderous reviews by New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani. True North, Jim Harrison’s new novel, a generational tale set in Michigan, did not make much headway either. The Dew Breaker, Edwidge Danticat’s novel in stories about Haitian émigrés, seemed to find a devoted audience. Craig Nova’s novel about crime and justice in Vermont—Cruisers—deserved a larger audience than it found, as did Project X, Jim Shepard’s linguistically daring version of a Columbine High School-like massacre. Francisco Goldman’s The Divine Husband, his attempt to write the great (Central) American novel, did not rise to that standard. Madison Smartt Bell completed his Haitian trilogy with the publication of The Stone That the Builder Refused.

Powerful battle scenes and the measured steadiness of men approaching mortal combat made up the pages of Donald Pfarrer’s magnificent The Fearless Man, his novel about the Vietnam War, as in the sequence in which a gunnery officer leads a small group of riflemen toward the hidden enemy: “First stop, Ambush Alley. Cross it. Don’t even think about using it. Then a stream to worry about. Then around, not over, two hills…and back into the jungle at the bottom. Choose a place and set in. Set up the gun. Post a watch to cover the place where the river and the trail cross. Go to sleep. Listen to the maniacs in the brain as you slide into slumber.”

Just as persuasive was the annealing prose in Marilynne Robinson’s long-awaited second novel, Gilead, the story of several generations of itinerant Midwestern American preachers: “I don’t write the way I speak. I’m afraid you would think I didn’t know any better. I don’t write the way I do for the pulpit, either, insofar as I can help it. That would be ridiculous, in the circumstances. I do try to write the way I think. But of course that all changes as soon as I put it into words. And the more it does seem to be my thinking, the more pulpitish it sounds, which I guess is inevitable. I will resist that inflection, nevertheless.” Robinson certainly resisted it, creating a marvelous skein of pure American plain-style prose.

Also quite convincing and wonderfully entertaining was Percival Everett’s American Desert, a satire on everything from born-again religious groups to academia and the military. A little more strident (and less effective) was another novel Everett published during the year, this one coauthored with James Kincaid, A History of the African-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond. Christopher Buckley had readers look at the Middle East through a cracked lens in his successful satire Florence of Arabia.

Nicholas Delbanco went to some major American cultural figures, Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone among them, to populate the Michigan landscape in The Vagabonds. Maria Flook remained in her native New England in the romantic mystery Lux. Octogenarian Louis Auchincloss kept his eye on New York City’s upper crust in East Side Story, his 60th book. Samantha Gillison brought out her second novel, The King of America, a book based on the life of the late Michael Rockefeller and set mostly along the coast of New Guinea, where Rockefeller was last seen. Andrew Sean Greer’s second novel, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, won much critical praise.

The once immensely popular novelist Herman Wouk, 89, brought out his first novel in 10 years, A Hole in Texas, an entertaining spoof about a particle physicist on the job in Texas and the workings of Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Another best-selling writer, John Grisham, weighed in with The Last Juror, which was less effective than his other legal thrillers. The Tarnished Eye, Judith Guest’s novel about a family massacred in northern Michigan, showed off her best talents. A best-seller-list phenomenon was the jointly authored The Rule of Four by first-time writers Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason.

A few impressive first novels made the bookstore shelves, if not the best-seller lists, including Loving Che by Ana Menéndez, Country of Origin by Don Lee, The Rope Eater by Ben Jones, Symptomatic by Danzy Senna, The Pink Institution by Selah Saterstrom, and Ask Me Anything by Francesca Delbanco (the daughter of novelist Nicholas Delbanco).

A number of elder statesmen published short-story collections, notably Ray Bradbury (The Cat’s Pajamas), John Barth (The Book of Ten Nights and a Night), E.L. Doctorow (Sweet Land Stories), and Gilbert Sorrentino (The Moon in Its Flight). Wendell Berry released That Distant Land, his collected stories. Joy Williams focused on themes of illness and decay in Honored Guest. Virginia writer John Rolfe Gardiner signed in with The Magellan House Stories.Los Angeles Times award winner David Means did not disappoint his growing audience with The Secret Goldfish, his third collection. Naturalist and essayist Barry Lopez stirred up some aesthetic controversy with his polemical collection Resistance. Brooklyn, N.Y., writer Jonathan Lethem showed off his gift for the short-story form with Men and Cartoons. Nominated for the National Book Award, Joan Silber’s Ideas of Heaven drew new critical attention for this New England-based writer. Bret Anthony Johnston made an impressive debut with the stories in Corpus Christi. Among reprints to notice were Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas (2003). The Collected Stories of Truman Capote came out along with a volume of his letters (Too Brief a Treat, edited by Gerald Clarke).

American poets continued to write powerfully in the lyric mode about perennial subjects. In Danger on Peaks Gary Snyder brought nature into the reader’s inner vision: “Hammering a dent out of a bucket/ a woodpecker answers from the woods.” The Clerk’s Tale,Spencer Reece’s debut work, focused on the world in which he made his living—haberdashery:

I am thirty-three and working in an expensive clothier,

selling suits to men I call “Sir.”

These men are muscled, groomed and cropped—

with wives and families that grow exponentially.

Mostly I talk of rep ties and bow ties,

of full-Windsor knots and half-Windsor knots,

of tattersall, French cuff, and English spread collars.

A number of poets issued volumes of collected verse. Santa Cruz, Calif., poet Robert Sward delivered The Collected Poems of Robert Sward, 1957–2004, which focused on the comedy of love and the spiritual: “They say there is a monk on the Santa Cruz Mountains,/ his white robes floating, three hundred feet beneath the sky.” Collected Poems came from Donald Justice (seeObituaries), Jean Valentine issued Door in the Mountain, William Matthews released Search Party: Collected Poems of William Matthews, Rodney Jones offered Kingdom of the Instant, and Thomas Lux published The Cradle Place. Barry Spacks released Regarding Women and The Hope of the Air, and Richard Howard produced Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963–2003. Robert Pinsky, together with Maggie Dietz, edited An Invitation to Poetry, another volume (along with a DVD) in the Favorite Poem Project, which he began when he was U.S. poet laureate. Nebraskan Ted Kooser (seeBiographies) was named poet laureate for 2004–05, and he published a new book of poetry during the year.

Standing out among various works of nonfiction was Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway, a burning account of illegal Mexican immigrants attempting to cross the desert into Arizona. Octogenarian novelist and essayist Mary Lee Settle presented a travel book about Spain, Spanish Recognitions: The Roads to the Present. Richard Rhodes delivered a well-received biography in John James Audubon: The Making of an American. Mary V. Dearborn contributed Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim. Architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable entered a brief but pithy biographical volume, Frank Lloyd Wright, in the Penguin Lives series.

Among literary biographies Barry Silesky’s John Gardner: Literary Outlaw was a useful contribution, as were Philip McFarland’s Hawthorne in Concord, Jeffrey Meyers’s Somerset Maugham, Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno’s E.E. Cummings, Eileen Warburton’s John Fowles, and Joan Reardon’s Poet of the Appetites: The Lives and Loves of M.F.K. Fisher. Evelyn C. White signed in with Alice Walker: A Life.

During the past decade a deluge of memoirs had been published. Those worth taking seriously during the year included Kathryn Harrison’s The Mother Knot and In My Father’s Footsteps by Sebastian Matthews, son of poet William Matthews. Another memoir with a father at the centre of the action was Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City.

A wonderfully invigorating polemical tone inhabited scholar-critic Mark Edmunson’s latest book, Why Read?: “Literature and truth? The humanities and truth? Come now. What could be more ridiculous? What could be more superannuated than that?” Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt’s book on “How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare,” moved toward the discerning public’s best-seller lists. Another volume with more than academic appeal was science-fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. Another eminently accessible book for the general public was essayist Phillip Lopate’s Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan.

Among interesting historical studies, the year saw the publication of Walter A. McDougall’s Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History 1585–1828, Shirley Christian’s Before Lewis and Clark, David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing, and Thomas Parrish’s The Submarine. The late Edward W. Said’s political columns about the Middle East turmoil appeared under the title From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map. In The Open Space of Democracy, Terry Tempest Williams created a lyrical polemic about politics and the environment. Novelist Rick Bass, who had written often on environmental questions, produced Caribou Rising: Defending the Porcupine Herd, Gwich-’in Culture, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. One of the most interesting cultural studies of the year was Alan Trachtenberg’s Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930.

The 2004 Pulitzer Prizes were awarded to works that appeared in 2003. The fiction prize went to Edward P. Jones for his novel The Known World, the poetry prize to Franz Wright for Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, the biography prize to William Taubman for Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, and the Pulitzer for general nonfiction to Anne Applebaum for Gulag: A History. At the PEN/Faulkner Award ceremonies in May, John Updike won the top prize for The Early Stories, 1953–1975 (2003). Luís Alberto Urrea won the Lannan Foundation Literary Award for Nonfiction. Later in 2004 the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction went to Richard Bausch and Nell Freudenberger.

The National Book Award for Fiction went to Lily Tuck’s The News from Paraguay, a novel set in 19th-century Paraguay about the relationship between a young Irishwoman and the dictator Francisco Solano López. In the nonfiction category Kevin Boyle’s Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Era, the story of a black family’s fight to live in a predominately white Detroit neighbourhood during the 1920s, captured the award.

Among the deaths during the year were those of fiction writers William Herrick and Ronald Sukenick. In addition to Justice, a number of poets died, including Thom Gunn, Anthony Hecht, Carl Rakosi, and Mona Van Duyn. Cultural historian Daniel Boorstin, historian Iris Chang, mystery writer Joseph Hansen, writer Hubert Selby, Jr., children’s author Paula Danziger, and critic and novelist Susan Sontag also left the literary scene.

Canada

The search for a home, refuge, person, or object was a common theme in Canadian literature in 2004. In Claire’s Head, Catherine Bush depicted a woman who did not allow her migraine headaches to prevent her from looking for her sister; in Cat’s Pilgrimage, Marilyn Bowering’s young heroine and her father sought refuge in a utopian community; in Bill Gaston’s Sointula, a mother kayaked along the British Columbia coastline on a quest for her son; and in Kate Pullinger’s A Little Stranger, a daughter searched for the alcoholic, homeless mother she could not forget. A Muslim woman in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s The Tiger Claw searched for her Jewish lover in Nazi Germany, while Harold Eustache, in Shuswap Journey, based his tale of a father looking for his abducted daughter on a traditional legend. More unusual was the severed arm sought in the bowels of Mumbai (Bombay) by Anosh Irani’s protagonist in The Cripple and His Talismans. The pursuit of truth informed Des Kennedy’s Flame of Separation, in which a teacher reexamined his life, and the quest for redemption in the eye of a hurricane preoccupied the narrator of Paul Quarrington’s Galveston.

The experiences of newcomers to Canada were explored in Esi Edugyan’s The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, about a Ghanaian struggling to make sense of life in Alberta, and in Wayson Choy’s All That Matters, the continuing saga of the Chen family in Vancouver, while someone desperate to be an immigrant was the subject of The Stowaway, Robert Hough’s fact-based novel. In Merilyn Simonds’s The Holding, a Scottish pioneer spoke across the years through her diary to the modern-day woman reading it.

Other novels included Anne Cameron’s Dahlia Cassidy, a satiric view of a small British Columbian town; Miriam Toews’s gentler depiction of the denizens of a small Mennonite town in A Complicated Kindness; Trevor Cole’s tour de force Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life; and Colin McAdam’s Some Great Thing, in which the paths of two powerful men intersect with unexpected consequences.

There were also Douglas Coupland’s strange coupling of extremes in Eleanor Rigby; Monica Kidd’s The Momentum of Red, in which a father and daughter struggle together to end his domination of her life; Richard B. Wright’s amalgam of mistress, misery, and murder in Adultery; and poet Don Coles’s first novel, Doctor Bloom’s Story, about the ethical dilemma faced by a creative-writing teacher regarding a student.

One way or another, many short-story collections, such as Ramona Dearing’s So Beautiful, were about the people one gets stuck with—not only family but roommates, teachers, spouses, and fellow passengers. Alice Munro’s Runaway scouted the depths of ordinary lives; George Bowering’s Standing on Richards was a wealth of stories in all their various disguises; Bonnie Dunlop’s The Beauty Box plucked tales of bittersweet midnights and regrets; and Mavis Gallant’s Montreal Stories addressed the consequences of returning home.

David Bezmozgis’s Natasha and Other Stories was a rich mixture of the minutiae of Jewish domestic life; Kelly Cooper’s Eyehill was a sequence of linked stories centred on a prairie town; and Yashin Blake’s tales in Nowhere Fast reflected the structure and improvisation of contemporary jazz.

Surrealism was the mode of Carrie Snyder’s Hair Hat, in which 11 lives are affected by this weird headgear, and it also flavoured Annabel Lyon’s three novellas in The Best Thing for You, painfully accurate portraits of parents bedeviled by their offspring.

Poets saw the glass both half-full and half-empty. Some of life’s bleaker aspects were explored by Patrick Lane in Go Leaving Strange; Eve Joseph in her volume of ghazals on physical and spiritual loss and death, The Startled Heart; George Fetherling in his memorial to his father, Singer: An Elegy; and Sue Goyette in Undone, meditations edged with dark longings. In counterbalance were Mari-Lou Rowley’s Viral Suite, exuberant excursions into bodily sensations and intimate acts; Roo Borson’s meticulously rendered interior landscapes, in Short Journey Upriver Toward Ōishida; and bill bisset’s innocent insights and irrepressible humour in narrativ engima/rumours uv hurricane. Tom Walmsley’s sex-sodden Honeymoon in Berlin was an eclectic collection of verbal riffs; Jan Zwicky’s Robinson’s Crossing engaged the nature of history; Tim Bowling’s The Memory Orchard plucked images from the past like apples, or guitars; while Wayde Compton’s Performance Bond fused verbal excursions of hip-hop and jazz into urban renewal.

Other Literature in English

Important works in English representing a variety of genres by authors young and old, emerging and established, highlighted the literary offerings for 2004 from sub-Saharan Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. Outstanding new releases from Africa included Purple Hibiscus, the debut novel by Nigerian-born writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in which the protagonist, Kambili, struggles with the abuse, hypocrisy, and deep pathology of her father and the Roman Catholic Church in a narrative informed by political and ideological issues. The acclaimed South African playwright, poet, journalist, painter, and author Zakes Mda brought out his latest novel, The Whale Caller, which was lauded for its deft characterizations and vivid atmosphere—“a poignant love story of outsiders, whales and dreams.” Mda’s 39-year-old countryman Troy Blacklaws, who resided in Frankfurt, Ger., drew praise for Karoo Boy, his breakthrough novel, which takes place in the Karoo outback and centres on the relationship between the protagonist, Douglas, and Moses, an old Xhosa man, as the two plan to travel together to Cape Town. Distinguished Somali author Naruddin Farah brought out his latest novel Links, which, in Dantean fashion, exposes life in his native country’s capital, Mogadishu, “the city of death.” Veteran writers and Nobel laureates J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer had end-of-the-year releases in 2003 that spawned great interest and were predictably short-listed for numerous national and international literary awards in 2004. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello marked somewhat of a departure for the author in that it combined essayistic narrative with a fictional framework. Gordimer brought out Loot, and Other Stories, her 12th collection. André Brink pleased his longtime readers with the publication of Before I Forget, in which the protagonist, a 78-year-old writer who fears he has lost his talent as an author, reflects on his life by recalling his numerous love affairs.

In New Zealand, Booker Prize winner Keri Hulme broke her silence of over a decade with the publication of Stonefish, a collection of short stories and verse. The winners of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2004 included Annamarie Jagose’s novel Slow Water (winner of the Deutz Medal for Fiction) and Anne Kennedy’s verse collection Sing-song (winner in the poetry category). Named one of the runners-up for the award in fiction was The Scornful Moon, which marked the return of renowned author Maurice Gee. Also of note was the latest release by C.K. Stead entitled Mansfield, a fictional portrait of New Zealand-born literary great Katherine Mansfield. Australia welcomed the latest verse collection by John Kinsella, Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems, which was hailed by American critic Harold Bloom, who wrote in his introduction, “We are poised before the onset of what I prophesy will be a major art.”

Sadly, 2004 marked the passing of Thea Astley, one of Australia’s most celebrated novelists, and of New Zealand authors Janet Frame and Maurice Shadbolt and historian Michael King. (See Obituaries.)